Related papers: Second-Order Stein Variational Dynamic Optimizatio…
This paper proposes a novel proximal-gradient algorithm for a decentralized optimization problem with a composite objective containing smooth and non-smooth terms. Specifically, the smooth and nonsmooth terms are dealt with by gradient and…
Interpretation of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) training as an optimal control problem with nonlinear dynamical systems has received considerable attention recently, yet the algorithmic development remains relatively limited. In this work, we…
We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a deterministic sampling algorithm that iteratively transports a set of particles to approximate given distributions, based on an efficient gradient-based update that guarantees to optimally…
Differential Dynamic Programming is an optimal control technique often used for trajectory generation. Many variations of this algorithm have been developed in the literature, including algorithms for stochastic dynamics or state and input…
A crucial task in predictive maintenance is estimating the remaining useful life of physical systems. In the last decade, deep learning has improved considerably upon traditional model-based and statistical approaches in terms of predictive…
Trajectory optimization methods have achieved an exceptional level of performance on real-world robots in recent years. These methods heavily rely on accurate analytical models of the dynamics, yet some aspects of the physical world can…
A new decomposition optimization algorithm, called \textit{path-following gradient-based decomposition}, is proposed to solve separable convex optimization problems. Unlike path-following Newton methods considered in the literature, this…
We develop a new algorithm for non-convex stochastic optimization that finds an $\epsilon$-critical point in the optimal $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector product computations. Our algorithm uses Hessian-vector…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) was recently proposed as a general purpose nonparametric variational inference algorithm [Liu & Wang, NIPS 2016]: it minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the target distribution and its…
State estimation in robotic systems presents significant challenges, particularly due to the prevalence of multimodal posterior distributions in real-world scenarios. One effective strategy for handling such complexity is to compute maximum…
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…
There are many approaches for training decision trees. This work introduces a novel gradient-based method for constructing decision trees that optimize arbitrary differentiable loss functions, overcoming the limitations of heuristic…
We introduce $\textit{Stein transport}$, a novel methodology for Bayesian inference designed to efficiently push an ensemble of particles along a predefined curve of tempered probability distributions. The driving vector field is chosen…
We propose a Stein variational distributionally robust controller for nonlinear dynamical systems with latent parametric uncertainty. The method is an alternative to conservative worst-case ambiguity-set optimization with a deterministic…
We propose a method of bi-coordinate variations for non-stationary and non-smooth optimization problems, which involve a single linear equality and box constraints. Here only approximation sequences are known instead of exact values of the…
This paper proposes a distributed stochastic algorithm with variance reduction for general smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization, which has wide applications in signal processing and machine learning communities. In distributed setting,…
A new method for stochastic control based on neural networks and using randomisation of discrete random variables is proposed and applied to optimal stopping time problems. The method models directly the policy and does not need the…
Robot design optimization, imitation learning and system identification share a common problem which requires optimization over robot or task parameters at the same time as optimizing the robot motion. To solve these problems, we can use…
This letter presents a method to reduce the computational demands of including second-order dynamics sensitivity information into the Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) trajectory optimization algorithm. An approach to DDP is developed…